A Broken System: An Insider Look From A Local Foster Parent’s Point Of View

This month, we wanted to share the story of a local foster-parent and their experience with the system. While the author wishes to remain anonymous for privacy concerns, we feel this is a powerful and heartbreaking story that needs to be heard. 

Understanding the Odds

Recently, I’ve been trying to squeeze 14 years of math knowledge into just a few months while studying for the GRE. In my studies, I have completed a series of online lessons discussing probability. The main take-away of these courses was this: If you are looking for the probability of this event happening OR that event, you add the 2 probabilities together. The chances get bigger and better. If you want to find the probability of this AND that happening, you multiply the probabilities together. The fraction keeps getting smaller and the chances of all the events aligning just so becomes more minuscule. When Baby L. was dropped off at our house a year ago, our goal was to help make reunification with his mom possible in any way we could. At the time, based on the connections she had made and services she was receiving, I thought reunification was a very high probability. 

The odds seemed in the mother’s favor. She had spoken with representatives from several non-profits who seemed to want to help her out. She had a previous case with DCS and supposedly knew the system, the lingo, and her case plan. Most importantly, she wanted to be Baby L’s mom. She wanted him so badly. A generous family had even offered her a room in their home where she could raise the baby while she was getting back on her feet. Also, Mama L. was sober. She had been for some time, and she continued to participate in treatment. The worker I spoke with assured me she would likely be granted in-home placement after just a few weeks of Baby L. being in our care. 

Understanding the System

Great, I thought. This is how the system should work! My vision of being a foster parent was to be a stop-gap caregiver. I wanted to be there for families when they needed some time to put the pieces of life back together. I knew DCS had an important job to keep kids safe, but it was also their job to support parents towards a speedy reunification when possible, right? Wasn’t that actually what was best for kids? Permanency? All of the classes my husband and I took towards getting our foster license emphasized that a foster parent’s goal should always be reunification of kids with biological parents as long as safety was not an issue. If our first foster placement had come when my husband and I were experiencing infertility, when we were really excited to grow our family, having that mindset would have been more difficult. But here we were, January 2019, two preschoolers deep and ready to try to help: a few weeks, a few months? No matter how long it took, we were committed to helping move Baby L’s case toward the best permanent situation for all parties. Until then, we would take the best care of him possible. I never thought through all the individual events that needed to happen. All the things that the mama needed to make happen and how improbable each of them were. 

Obtaining a Sustaining Income

First, income. Now, this may seem cut and dry to you. Of course parents need to have sufficient income to provide food, clothing, and shelter for their children. It would not be safe to return Baby L. to his mom unless the state knew that she could provide these things for him. But have you ever stopped to think about how many unemployed people have children? Or how many loving parents struggle to provide these things for their children? Few people would support the state removing a child from his or her parents because of poverty alone. However, once a child has been removed, many of the requirements a parent must meet to prove readiness for reunification require cold, hard cash. For example, parents looking to reunify with a baby must purchase a crib- it cannot be a pack-n-play- before their baby can come home. Their shower must have shampoo. Their changing station must have diapers. 

Many non-profits try to provide these things for struggling parents, but taking advantage of those opportunities requires know-how and transportation. A parent might need to hop between several non-profits to procure all the necessities. Mama L. does not have a car. She relies on our less-than-efficient city bus system for transportation. Each individual errand takes time. Lots of time. Mama L. was trying to be a single-parent household. There is no father in the picture and no family support available, so Mama L. needed to go find herself…

A job. In the midst of postpartum recovery and the grief of being separated from her child, Mama L. needed to fill out applications (which requires a bus trip to the library) and get herself to some interviews (more bus trips). And Mama L. did. She found a job. She found many jobs in the midst of a pandemic. However, because of Mama L’s level of education and the urgency of her quest for a job, these jobs did not have the best bosses, the best schedules, or the best coworkers. She held onto each job for about 5 weeks, give or take. Then, there was a scheduling conflict, an unreasonable boss, and/or a litany of verbally abusive interactions, and she would quit and find another job. That she needed to procure a job was made very clear in her case plan with the state. However, they did not define for her their picture of stable employment. That would have required…

Clear Communication From the Foster System

After my husband and I pushed the case manager on what concrete goals she had for Mama L., she shared with us that Mama needed to hold onto the same job for at least 90 days. She was nervous to share this number with us. “It’s hard to put an exact length on it,” the case manager had said. Ah yes, but can’t we put a minimum length on it? I would wonder. How is this mom supposed to know if she is succeeding in your plan unless you make it measurable? A litany of four case manager transitions (one of them was wonderful) over a period of 12 months did not help the issue of ambiguous goals and lack of communication throughout. Not only was Mama L. unaware of the specific expectations for her employment, but no one was there to help support her in holding down a job. She needed someone to walk her through how to handle conflict at work in a productive way. How does one have a conversation with their boss in which they stand up for themselves but don’t quit? Mama L. could have benefitted so much from job training that did not just teach how to get a job, but how to pick and keep a job as well. If she had gotten that sustainable job, and learned healthy workplace communication, she would need…

Childcare

Not just any childcare. She needed affordable childcare and possibly childcare that would allow her to work evening or night shifts. If you are a parent who has sought out childcare and is aware of the minimum wage in our town, I don’t need to expound long on the probability of finding a perfect match here. And back to those bus rides. Think about the time it would take to ride the bus to a daycare center to drop your child off, and then find another bus that could get you to work on time.

Housing

And where would they live? Finding housing in Flagstaff is hard. Finding housing in Flagstaff is HARD even if you have stable income. It is even harder with a history of eviction, and harder still without a job. After the 6 months of temporary free housing provided by a family, Mama L. moved into a motel for a while. It was all she could find. This happened right around the first court permanency hearing. She assumed that her living situation was a big reason the judge did not rule towards reunification that day. We assumed the same. It turns out that a family can be reunified with their child while living in a motel as long as they can demonstrate that it has the potential of being a stable place to live through proof of income, etc. This information was never shared with Mama L. On the other hand, Mama L. told me herself that she did not want Baby L. coming to that motel. Parents don’t want to raise their kids in motels. But when it came to finding an apartment in Flagstaff, the probability of this one event had the power to single-handedly bring down the probability of reunification at all. She eventually moved back to the single-occupancy housing she had lived in while pregnant. Children are not allowed to live there.

Visits

This was a place where Mama L. shined. She was warm and nurturing with Baby L. She played with him, she changed him, and she was always bringing him new clothes. She made him smile. He was comfortable around her. She showed up to every visit until she got sick this spring. DCS policy made sense. She needed to show positive COVID results for her absences to be excused for a long period of time, and she needed to show negative COVID results to be able to see her son again. They were trying to keep her son and us, his foster family, safe. But this red tape in the midst of all the other red tape was too much. 

COVID testing is done at Fort Tuthill. She had no car. She couldn’t ask a friend for a ride if she was wondering whether or not she had COVID. This obstacle took more than 2 months to resolve. More than 2 months without seeing her son in person. There were a few Facetime calls, but no snuggles, and no significant input from Baby L., because it was a screen, and he was only 6 months old. In my mind, this 2 month hiatus of seeing her child drained the rest of Mama L’s motivation to do the impossible. She finally got the results needed to see him again, and did so a few times before we left for a long trip in the fall. She cancelled the last visit before we left due to feeling under the weather. She has not seen him since. She has fallen out of contact with DCS. This was how they all expected the case to end. 

But how could it not? In the context of this system, the only “supports” offered to her in the last few months were a list of expectations she needed to fulfill and an offering of a few sessions of family therapy. She hung in there, trying, for 7 months. Seven months of only seeing her son for 4 hours a week, if that. Could she have tried harder in some areas? Probably. But when you have so much to figure out, where do you start? Do you go after the job first and then the housing? Do you find out what childcare possibilities are out there so you know what sort of job you can have? It is all so much to coordinate while also managing the stresses of addiction treatment, not seeing your child, and navigating a life of poverty in an expensive city. At what point do you see the odds continuing to stack against you and just decide you can’t win? After 12 months, the case is moving towards severance of parental rights, and at this point, DCS is not wrong in their decision. Mama L. could not provide Baby L, who is now Toddler L, with a stable home at this point. Probability predicted the outcome. When you multiply INCOME x JOB x GOOD RELATIONSHIP WITH DCS X CHILDCARE x HOUSING x ADDICTION TREATMENT, the odds are never in the parents’ favor, and as such, nobody is winning. Baby L has been well cared-for and loved, but no matter how amazing his future permanent family might be, he will always mourn this broken relationship with his biological mother who wanted him so badly.

This is where a place like Sage Home could make all the difference. Imagine if Mama L. had her housing provided, in-house treatment, job training, parenting classes, childcare when necessary, and the chance to live with her baby, fostering attachment. The odds of their staying together would have been vastly different. The Sage Home model just makes so much more sense. Parents in the system need wrap-around services. The foster system has always claimed the goal of keeping children safe while rehabilitating parents. But the design doesn’t match the purpose. Sage Home’s design reflects that fact that rehabilitation is more successful and longer-lasting when it happens in the context of keeping families together. 

We believe that families should be able to safely stay together on their path to sobriety.

You can help us keep families together so that no child has to be separated from their family, and no mother separated from their child.

Are you with us?